I think that’s exactly the kind of subtle thing he is trying to capture in this essay: we read ‘unorthodox’ and we get ready, almost as a subconscious reflex, to dismiss whatever comes next as, like you put it, ‘blatant Xism’, or as Paul puts it, false.
Also, the part to get from 'this demonstrates what I had in mind' to 'actual finished, truly functioning project', is just... Dull. It's bugfixing, stepping back and realizing there's security issues, and whatnot. It's the stuff we associate with getting paid for, basically :)
Just curious: why is there nothing anounced on 99dresses.com about this? Will the business go on after all? Are we in the final days and will it then just suddenly out of the blue shut down?
Actually I don't really get why anaphora are considered so hard:
the difference between
We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were hungry.
and
We gave the bananas to the monkeys because they were ripe.
is simply to check in what you know about the world. Monkeys are animals, which can be hungry. Bananas are fruits which can be ripe. The third example is ambiguous because both animals and fruits can be 'here'.
Similarly, out of all the meanings of 'bank', there's only one that can be sat on.
Consider me naive, but it shouldn't be too hard to build a program backed by nothing more than an SQL database that can handle these.
And consider me SUPER naive, but that's exactly what I am doing at the moment in my spare time.
I personally like how it's not too easy to find subreddits, and how it happens mostly trough people mentioning them. It keeps many communities nice and small and protected from the 'lowest common denominator' effect.
Of course this means I may be missing out, but that doesn't bother me too much.
I found a couple of wonderful subreddits by just typing the most obvious subreddit address btw (r/piano ...). And once you have found one subreddit on a topic, most of them are kind enough to put links to related subreddits in their sidebar.
(only example I can think of now is r/drunk and r/cripplingalcoholics, though that's maybe not the ideal choice :-))
I'm at a very early-stage start-up of 2, and we wanted a centralized tool to keep track of bugs, todos, ideas, potential testers and (oh my) leads/customers. And we don't need or want the overhead, and often cost (however small, we're not even close to ramen-profitable) of 'specialized' tools.
We first worked with a Google spreadsheet, but 'marking' and on-the-fly organizing items was too cumbersome. We then looked at trello.com but their 'cards' are a bit too big for our taste and you cannot position everything where you want so you can only have left-to-right 'flow'.
So I threw this last week and started using it right away, and frankly we both love it. So here it is online, who knows if somebody else likes it.
Hope nobody gets offended by the silly light-hearted tone of the web site, writing it like that has been a nice break between more 'serious' matters (our startup is in e-commerce).
I don't know for sure, but I would suspect that Facebook's description of "The Hacker Way" when they filed their IPO helped a bit to give it a positive connotation.
Awesome! That's Thomas Fuchs from Scriptaculous, no? Scriptaculous is what caused me to learn JS, and by exention, to go from just dabbling with HTML-only static pages to actually doing web developing (which is now my career).
I love that one-page design for Freckle, but you might want to add a trial sign-up button at the top too for us impatient types! (I know it's not the 'real' landing page which is letsfreckle.com, curious as to why you would point us to this smallish version? A/B testing experiment?)
Everytimezone looks awesome! My remarks on the design, but I understand it's still a work in progress of course:
- don't just show cities, but also zones like 'Central European Time' or 'GMT' or 'Central time'.
- in the cities, include their timezone (GMT-1, GMT+3, etc)
- why just limit it to 'know'? When scheduling a meeting for within a couple of days I think it would be cool if I could scroll to the right to see how things are in that day. Or perhaps provide an input field to set the 'central' day viewed in the tool or something.
Great read! For the same reason as Paul (i.e. it's fun) I'll put my own list here. Apart from the interesting fact that Paul is actually on - my - list (since long before I read this essay, really), so are some of his heroes so I guess that makes 'heroic devotion' transitive or heritable or whatever. In descending order of admiration:
Isaac Newton - apart from more or less inventing modern physics (he's up there with Maxwell and Einstein in my physics heroes top 3), he found he couldn't solve the fundamental equations he discovered, so he kinda invented modern maths to help with that. Sweet. As for my maths heroes top 3, that's completed with Gauss and Laplace because they did similar things but in a less earth-shattering way. After all it can happen only once to discover mechanics, gravity, the most powerful series around or differential calculus (but who'd have thought it'd be the same guy!).
Noel Gallagher, Paul McCartney - they are realllly smart and creative guys, and instead of caring too much about politics and the likes they just wrote a big pile of Shockingly Good Songs. They had a direct influence in me getting into music (songwriting), and not a month goes by without me fantasizing about becoming famous enough to meet Noel somewhere backstage and chat with him over a beer. In fact, more chance of meeting Noel - together with "playing at nicer venues" - is a big part of why fame in music attracts me. The top 3 is completed by Steve Jobs (really) for similar reasons. Another big reason of why fame attracts me stems from my next hero...
Bill Gates - he did not only cofound, ran and drove the software company that makes/made the best products in the world or that understands 'software' orders of magnitude better than anybody else ("it's usability, stupid"), he also now spends his days using his fortune, fame and brains to really try to make this world a better place. I cannot express in words how much I admire both facets of his life and if there's one answer to "if you could choose, where would you want to be in 20 years?" for me the answer is to be like Bill Gates, having made it big and using that to try and make the world a better place. I admire Bono, Warren Buffet and John Lennon for the same reason and very often find myself passionately defending all of these guys to others who slack them for sheer fame (at least that's why I think it is).
Joel & Paul - not only did they do A Really Good Job in software business themselves, they also are an ongoing source of inspiration for me and others because they write so well about it. Hacking by itself is not my passion, but somehow every other facet about software development/business is, and that's in large part because of the writings of these guys. Again, there's really a top 3 and it's completed by "all the others" (Stevey, Guy Kawasaki, the Rands, etc...).
By the way: I am a music-playing phycisist/mathematician working on software most of the time, as one might have guessed :-)
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